Special Sets with Santa Clara Swim Club’s George Haines
By Michael J. Stott
Often, in life and in coaching, we forget that the past can be prologue. As professionals, it never hurts to be a student of the sport. Sometimes that means visiting archival material, be it documents, voices, videos or all of the above to reacquaint ourselves with coaching legends and the methods that made them so effective. Here, Swimming World features the legendary George Haines.
George Haines founded the Santa Clara Swim Club in December 1950, eventually winning 43 senior national club team titles. A three-time Olympic head coach and four-time assistant, he coached 53 Olympians who won 44 gold, 14 silver and 10 bronze medals. On the 1964 USA Olympic team alone, 13 Santa Clara swimmers won 13 Olympic gold medals.
From 1978-82, Haines directed the UCLA men’s swimming team. He later led the Stanford women’s team to an NCAA championship (1983) as well as two second- and two third-place finishes. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1977.
“George was pretty intuitive and had great personal relations with all his swimmers—even competitors like Don Schollander and me. Each of us trusted him to be fair and nonpartisan. I prided myself working with the middle distance group (not the drop dead sprinters), but I remember George’s sets mid-season as more quality and less quantity than some other coaches at the time. A tough set was 15 x 100 long course on 1:45 or 2:00. Or maybe 8 x 200 LC on 4:00. We did a lot of pulling and kick sets. We went twice a day and totaled maybe 5,000 to 6,000 meters.”
-Steve Clark (2x Olympian, 3x gold medalist, ISHOF inductee, 1966)
What endeared Haines was his outstanding personal connections with all his swimmers. To see him interact with them on deck is instructive. To view the technique of yore is fascinating. Much is the same, though one wonders how much faster his superstars would have gone had they employed the start techniques used today.
To access the full training sets used by George Haines,
Check out the February issue of Swimming World Magazine, available now!
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